Paul Myburgh talks onPeople of the Great Sandface: An Interview with Keyan Tomaselli

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1989
CVA Reviews, pp. 26-31

I
came out of Submarines - the ocean - when I was 18 years old. I
worked underground in the mines, I lived in the bush doing
hydrology, I was a rose farmer, and then I went into the desert. I
was into fundamental elements as a human: deserts, oceans, big
things -things bigger than myself. I'd sold my motorbike to get the
two spools and the camera. I was obsessed with going to see the
Bushmen. I didn't know where they were. I knew nothing about them
other than what I had read, which turned out to be mostly untrue
anyway. I began to pursue Bushmen and the Bushman in myself, and
for another ten years went right through Namibia. I lived with the
Kung, ** Hei om , the Tgaiekwe (the people who walk on stones), the
Xo and finally into Botswana where the last wild people lived - the
Gwikwe. (Gwi means Bush and Kwe means People).

What was it that called you to do this odyssey?
I studied anthropology and communications by correspondence at the
University of South Africa between the ages of 18 and 28. It was then
that I became angry about the amount of media representation. In my
early naïve years I had been inspired by the writing of van de Post,
but through my own experience soon realized that he too was only
perpetuating that same romantic *** found in most media and
anthropological misrepresentation. He was a white colonial *** sing
his own lost ideals on other people. They were the ideals that van der
Post was looking ** himself. It's not right to do that. Like so many
writers who recreate the 'Noble Savage' for the sake of their own
conscience. I wanted the people to speak for themselves, as I would
speak for myself about the " wind" in my own head. You know, when I
first went into the Kalahari the *** of the "wind" inside my head was
the same as the feeling of the "wind" outside my head. I *** I had
come home. Home is an intangible qualitative place, that feeling of
familiarity ***.

Where does the title " People of the great sand face" come from?
The Gwikwe call the earth Guam tge, which means, "sand face", hence The People of the Sand Face.
While studying communications I learned about Robert Flaherty and
Nanook of the North John Grierson's Coalface- and these men who
seemed to care about their fellow ***. What it was said they had done
inspired me. It was then that I wanted to make a film, *** day when
they wrote about films and they wrote about documentaries and they
wrote *** Nanook and they wrote about Coalface then they would write
about Sandface in the same ***.

How did you relate your Academic studies to the production of your film?
My academic studies were incidental while my real anthropological
experiences were mental. I studied film, anthropology, and worked in
the industry as a cameraman and editor *** to become totally
versatile as an instrument. I know that the only way that I could
make *** was alone. Too many conflicting objectives if I used a whole
crew. I had to be a one Interpretation. I had to become a Bushman, A
Gwikwe in order to speak for the Gwikwe. I had to be able to speak the
language. I criticize people like van der Post here because he allows
*** to be set up as the commercial figurehead in this subject.
Capitalizes on being regarded as *** while he doesn't speak a word of
the people's own language, of Bushman. If I made a *** Afrikaaners
and I couldn't speak Afrikaans it would never be accepted, but
because they *** and non-white it is accepted. It's that same old
romantic patronizing trap which van der Post has set for himself.
As a documentary maker I learnt that you don't make value judgements.
You either *** with something with total respect or you don't do it
at all. I have to put my spear *** a Gemsbock -the killing is not
what is important, it's the process.

You
mentioned Flaherty. But unlike Flaherty who excluded scenes
detrimental to his romanticism, you went to the sand face and
included the elements of life which are detrimental to the romantic
experience.
I think in this case these elements were not
really detrimental to the romantic experience. They were the reality
and served thus to enhance the whole story. To have edited these
elements out in order not to disturb a preconditioned audience would
have been a lie. We must stop underestimating the human response of
audiences. Whatever the fact or element, if communicated in the right
context, it is acceptable to people. In Flaherty's case perhaps he
was just dealing with what actually existed. I don't know, I wasn't
there. Perhaps for romantic reasons he was recreating what it had
been like before the changes came. To make judgements on this level
is an academic pursuit. I'm always scared of that because words can
destroy the real meaning of everything somehow. "Sandface" is
heart-full, no head. Heads discriminate. I ran with the Gwikwe, I
hunted with the Gwikwe… I was the first white man they knew of who
had lived with the Bushmen according to their own ancient manner.

You
criticize van der Post for Romanticism. But your own film lacks
reflexivity, the ethnographic presence. How did you deal with your
subjectivity in the making of the film?
If Sandface lacks
the ethnographic presence or reflexivity it is because these
qualities are too often an imposed and misunderstood standard. I think
I'm taking about the honest reflection of what actually exists, and
not the reflection of what I would like to exist. The thing simply is
the way that it is. In terms of my won subjectivity I believe that I
was immersed beyond the point where my subjectivity could have been a
limitation to the truth. Before I thought or presumed to talk for
the Bushmen I had to become a Bushman. This wasn't so much a romantic
desire as a practical necessity in terms of the role which I had
undertaken. I could have made the film 8 years before I did, because
even then I had more access than any of the current filmmakers in
that area, with the exception of John Marshall. I could have made the
film in three months and I could have made a lot of money a whole
lot quicker - but I was doing it for other reasons too. I was doing
it for myself, for the Bushman in me, and for the Bushmen around me.

How did the last band of Bushmen depicted in the film come about?
In Botswana, in the central Kalahari, there had probably once been
between a dozen and eighteen bands, each of 24 to 30 people. That
area of the Kalahari is very barren and could not support larger
groups of people. Gradually then members of all those bands had some
of them to drift towards the settlement or the farms on the edge of
Kalahari. This left the bands smaller and therefore more vulnerable
and less viable as a group in that environment. So two bands might
then join up, and then again some people would drift off, and so all
that was eventually left where a few extended families. All of whom
knew each other. There were three main family groups.

Bushmen
are not nomadic by choice or preference, as is implied in most
textbooks; they are nomadic out of necessity only. In olden times
when these people lived in areas with permanent water supply and food
sources more abundant they were much less nomadic - there was less
need. When living in these more abundant environments they had more
leisure time-there was less need. When living in these more abundant
environments they had more leisure time, with more time therefore for
art and creativity. Because of the pressure of movement in the last
five hundred years brought on by the invasion of more purposeful
peoples into their territory, there has been very little art - I
believe as a result of this pressure brought to bear on the whole
Bushman organism. Art in the natural context is more often the result
of a people having more leisure time. For these people now life has
become only a quest for survival. Do Kgoutwe became our place, my place
too - I had found the gemsbok under the "old man's tree". It was the
end of that long journey which I had been on for eleven/twelve years,
five of which I had constantly with these ancient peoples. Of the
following three years I spent with the Gwikwe, two years were
dedicated to the making of this film.

Could
you tell me something about how you went about filming? Was the
equipment intrusive? How did it effect the behaviour of the band?
I didn't film all the time. Most of the time I was trying to survive.
I had to feed myself and play a part as another hunter in the band.
Sometimes the camera came to my hand and then I would film.

Where did you hold the mike?
I had a good rifle mike. I could generally just put it down and point
it. I was working in an area where the natural acoustics were
phenomenal - like being in a perfectly balanced studio. In the kind
of culture that these people manifest everything repeats itself
sometime or other, so there was no real continuity problem. People
would wear the same skins for a long while, until they wore out, and
then they would make new ones which would look just the same anyway.
The scenery didn't change radically either, so I could film a dance, and
then this dance would take place 2 weeks later and then 2 weeks
later again and I would just keep on filming, each time adding that
little extra. Each time I would film whatever inspired me - and the
life continued thus, these different events always repeating
themselves.

Are you referring to some kind of macro sound/visual continuity?
Yes, that macro sound/visual continuity existed because we were one
ecosystem. We each sat around our own fire, and it was one fire. One
child crying was all the children crying -one was for all the others
in that time. It was absolute, and we were a completely closed
ecosystem going around in itself.

This
kind of continuity hides relationships, the difference between
events, and the actual presence of the crew. How was the sound
macro-continuity constructed in the film? How did this effect the
macro continuity of the film?
A lot of the sound track
was post-synced, and the accompanying additional effects were fed in
afterwards. The tape recorder always just ran, even when I wasn't
filming I would just switch on and let it run. I believe I didn't have
to think much about the repetition and the difference, I knew it so
well. I was fully immersed in that culture, fully conversant with all
the subtleties of every different voice and dance and the reasons
why, the times and the personal feelings involved at that time
-because they were my feelings. I too would initiate a dance at times
when I felt a need to release my own confusion or insecurity; so
instinctively I could differentiate when listening back to tape. To
consciously differentiate very different sound and breath and voice I
heard was very very easy, it was all within me. I didn't have to
think about and analyse behaviour and write copious notes - it would
have diminished the parameters of the event. All the music heard in
Sandface was played by people in that actual band. It wasn't music
from other places, it was music that we had shared, and I touched and
played those same instruments around the same fire at the same time,
and the musicians were my brothers and my sisters.

What
excited me about the item broadcast on SATV was that we saw you and
Anita, the outsiders in a sense. Whereas in people of the Great Sand
Face we didn't see you who was making the film.
But
you heard my voice on narration. The aim was not to make a film about
some white "hero" living with the Gwikwe, but rather to tell the
story of the people themselves. Although there was huge commercial
viability in myself as the white Bushman, it would have been just
another imposed ego trip. Another producer could maybe pick up on
that story.

We didn't see how the people reacted to the camera. How did they react to the technology that you brought in?
They were so familiar with the camera, an old hand crank bolex that I
had constantly carried around for two years that it had long ceased
to be important to them. This camera never had film in it anyway. I
had this thing about familiarising them with regard to me and my
camera, which is sort of naïve but it works.

Edgar
Morin describes this as "intensive sociality", where the
anthropologist or filmmaker immerses him/herself in the community,
getting them used to you and your technology, did they notice the
camera?
No, it meant nothing to them. I was just another
hunter with a black thing on his one shoulder in addition to my
hunting bag on the other shoulder. It did not affect their daily
lives in any way so it ceased to be important. Just once, because I
was always looking through this thing, this camera - someone wanted
to look through this thing as well, and then they all wanted to look.
And they all had a look, but because the camera was either zoomed in
or out of focus, they couldn't see too well or not at all, because
you know how if your eye is not properly lined up with the eye-piece
you can't see through anyway. From this day, they called the camera
"The thing that cannot see is looking at you." That was its name.
So believing that when I was looking through the camera that I could
not see too well perhaps gave me access into certain sensitive scenes
like the woman's puberty dance-which no man may normally attend. The
women said that I as a man could attend the dance so long as I kept
my eyes in the camera, because then they said, I wouldn't see them
and that gamama -the great God - could not be angry.

Didn't filming the puberty scenes raise ethical questions for you. You knew you could see, even if they didn't?
On one level yes, and on one level no. You see, there were two
parallels here. On the one hand they needed to justify communally,
that it was okay for me to be there by saying that Paulau (myself)
could not see. On the other hand they knew full well that I could
see, otherwise I would not be looking. It was okay; I was their
brother, spiritual father of their children. I had children who slept
with me, there were women whom I loved, and who loved me, and I had men
who were my fathers and brothers. We had hunted together, we had
been wounded together, we had thirsted, we had hungered together. We
had developed bonds which far surpass the kinds which could be
formulated through an existence in the city. They knew me -it was
okay.

How did you follow ethical considerations through during editing?
I once filmed a scene with the women which was very intimate, very
childlike, very beautiful. It was a whole washing scene, like
watching 6 little girls in the bathtub, all discovering themselves,
inspecting themselves and trying to figure out how all the different
parts worked. They were having such fun, total innocence, absolute
innocence. It was an astonishing scene, and I got some remarkable
footage. When I got to see the footage - from the context of our
"civilized" Western world - I destroyed it, leaving only a few
innocent scenes. From the point of commercial anthropology that scene
was worth a fortune. I destroyed that scene because they were my
sisters, mothers -they weren't just some people, some commodity, but
my family. In a case like this I had to exercise the choice for a
people who were not able to comprehend the alternative choices
themselves. I mean, in the name of film or anthropology, could you
allow your mother or sister to be seen and misinterpreted like that?

Certainly not by the film industry.
Ja, and this voracious grey mass out here who gobble and demand so
much to be entertained at any cost, to be fed figurative hamburgers
by a pimp whose only ethic is quantity. So no. So look, I had
throughout to question my integrity, to question my influence, my
power in the group. I had at times to reduce my power, because I know
things, I have learned a technology and other things which could
have made my life much easier. Although I never did have the desire to
impose myself in this way, I still had to direct myself originally so
that I didn't influence what was coming out of them - the Gwikwe. I
had to be just another hunter.

Have you shown the film to the group?
No, it would have been wrong to do so. Perhaps I could do it now that
they have been in the settlement for some time already. I would
films them looking at the film, see their responses and use this as a
motivation to go into their lives now, and then flashback through
their own memories back to how it once was. A personalised
comparison. It would then be a valuable record which no one else has
done.

What did they think you were actually doing?
They didn't know, they couldn't know what I was actually doing. I was
just doing this a lot of the time and that was one of my
characteristics. I was just looking through this black thing. They
couldn't conceive of film or picture or the end result of all my
doings, so they lost interest in a sense.
Towards the end, during
the time we were seriously contemplating living in the settlement of
!xoi !xom somebody came upon three Polaroid pictures which I had
taken for reference. They were clear pictures of Gining !u, the Healing
Man, a wide shot, a mid shot and a close up. Nobody in that entire
band could see from the pictures who it was, let alone what it was
depicted in the frame.
When I pointed out that it was a person
they all started guessing who it might be. Not even his wife, not one
person in the band could recognise him, and they were all saying; Oh
look, it's the old man, No, it's the old lady, or No, No, its this
or that child. They had not at this stage ever been exposed to a
two-dimensional image of this nature - their brains had not yet
learned how to correctly interpret a two-dimensional image. Organic
natural perspectives verses inorganic recreated perspective.
Anyway, there were more important things to do: we were surviving; we
were hunting, gathering, dancing. We were quarreling; we were making
decisions about going to the settlement. With the filming they were
totally oblivious. When you see the film you know that there was no
setting up, there was no evident camera awareness, no reaction to the
camera. This was only possible because I was so immersed in that
life that I could through my access to !Gwikwe language and just
through knowing what would be the next instinctive response to any
situation I was always able to be there when I should be.

How did the group decide to move into the settlement?
It was a decision which we all came to together, we were too hungry,
we were too thirsty, and it had been like this before, but this time
there were differences, there was an alternative which had not been
there before - the settlement. When my journey first started I knew
that this day would come -they didn't, they couldn't. The hunters
from the settlement were coming with horses further and further into
our territory and chasing away the Eland and killing all the antelope
which had before been there for us, and it was a dry time anyway - it
had been a long dry time, and now there was this alternative again -
of water in the settlement, and food - meiliemeal. They sat around
our fires and the children would be crying for water or for hunger.
Three months before the end - the exodus - I went with Sema!nua and
Gining!u to go and see the settlement. We were hunting near … I'd
been there before. I showed them the taps, they drank. We stayed
there a couple of days. They didn't like it, but they did too - it was a
nemesis. They knew that we would go there, it was the course of
things…. and when we all left for the settlement that day there was a
pain in the silence. That was the exodus of a people, the final
exodus of the last wild. !Gwikwe from the Great Sand Face, From Guam!
Tge. We were together in what will one day even now be seen as an
historical event.

What has happened to those people?
About two-thirds of our band are in the settlement. The Kalahari
ecosystem cannot support that many animals living in none place.
Maybe 400 people in the settlement, and they have used up all the
veld food around for a 7-80 km radius. Only a man with a horse is a
viable hunter now, so if you don't have a horse your social status
declines. If you have a horse then you're somebody.
Before this
time there had never been any difference in status between people.
Some of the others live a little way out of the settlement, but they
visit occasionally because they have family there. Each time they
visit they stay a little longer. They are not a band anymore. They
have tasted their nemesis.

What do they do for food?
Some food is brought in by the government of Botswana -mieliemeal,
and otherwise they try to go on as before. Settlement people become
sick and old very quickly - it is the mieliemeal. Never before have
they eaten grain as a staple diet, it rots in their stomachs, it
won't digest. Settlement Bushmen live 60-70 years- not likely. Wild
people live to 100 years and often more, I know many who are older
than 100 years. There is one man who is over 115 years and he still
walks 20 kms to visit me when I stay at Xolo - away from the
settlement.
And Dzero O, he's now very close to 100, and when we
did that ling giraffe hunt three years ago in the film we did about
240 kms in 4 days, and that's a long way in that kind of heat, with
no water and a little food found along the way, and he did that, that
man, and he still danced when we got back to the shelters that
night. We danced for Geruma, we danced for the ostrich. That's a man of
97-98. He was 94 at the time.

How did he/ you know he was that old?
Through knowing intimately their history, where they came from each
one and who they were related to, and how they were related. Gining
!u had lived in Kimchoro (which means "the place of dead locusts')
during the two years of serious locust plagues. He has scars on his
back, one big scar which was from a sore cause from the locusts. He
was just starting to walk then, he was about two years old, so I know
therefore that he is about 50 years now. While Dzero O was a younger
hunter first shooting (about 14) he remembers !Tguikwe as a young
child being carried on her older sister's back, !Gikwe's sister was
going into puberty, and !Tguikwe was about 2 years, and so and so was
related to this one and this one to that one, and they all remember
clearly the time and the relationship. And this whole family tree was
thus constructed, and we got to, I'm quite sure with most people,
within one or two years of the actual date.

Van der Post's testament to the Bushmen was much more structured than Sandface.
Those techniques are so easy; I can go and do that any time. But it's
a question of choice and integrity, what are you trying to do. Are
you trying to make money and be clever and famous and serve a market
which doesn't know the difference anyway, or are you trying really to
make a film about a people and their reality. Van der Post made no
testament to the Bushmen; he endeavored only to make a testament to
himself.

Author: Siyolwe, Wabei
Date:
Interview
WS: Southern Africa has a unique media history - race,
class, cinema, broadcasting and censorship. Your research
and writing explores these issues in the context of South and
Southern Africa. Why do you address these issues? Why does this mean
so much to you?

Tomaselli:
I started my university education at the University of
Witwatersrand (Wits) in 1968 wanting to be a meteorologist, then a
psychologist, then an urban geographer. However, while at Wits
(1968-1973) I became interested in making movies. I had made
a number of short Super-8 films for modern idiom church
services at St Columba's in Johannesburg in the late 1960s. This was a
most progressive Church, in which the youth were involved in
church government, and encouraged to create annual
multimedia worship services. The services were very successful in
drawing in youth who normally avoided religion. This was my
first taste of a truely democratic institution.

My
second film was on the last legal student protest march
during apartheid in Johannesburg in 1970. The film was shown on campus
and at churches. It was regularly updated over the next four
years, as protest and anti-apartheid student struggle
intensified at Wits. As South Africa did not have TV in those days, the
films I made on these protests were shown in edited, and
immediately in unedited form, at campus film screenings and
other events. The continually lengthening documentary and the
unedited shorts performed the function of TV news for students who
were also often the participants in the protests. The
composite edited film was sold to a number of local and
international anti-apartheid organisations. I then made other short
films for a variety of University and anti-apartheid
organisations. I learned TV production while working as a
cameraman and floor manager in the newly built educational TV studio on
the campus between 1972 and 1973.

The
title which gained the attention of the South Africa film
industry, however, was a 30 minute Super-8 film I had made with friends
and colleagues on surfing in 1972. Suddenly I was being
offered top jobs in the professional industry. Compared to
these professionals I was still very much an amateur. When I
finished my studies I joined a company and made sports documentaries,
vox pops for advertising companies, and product promotional
films between 1974 and 1977. As the protests on the Wits
campus continued I found time to cover these events. This eventually
led to my brief detention by the Security Police. I was
fortunate, however, in working with some of the industry's
top technicians as a production manager, cameraman and
director during the late '70s.

Though
I learned a great amount, and had a great time while
working in the industry, making a living was very hard in those pre-TV
days. When TV was introduced in 1976 I bought into a film
sound studio. But the pressures of paying the monthly lease
on the studio killed the enjoyment of production. I sold my shares and
was offered a post in the newly established School of
Dramatic Art at the University of Witwatersrand in 1977. I
was employed to teach film and TV production. Though I knew the
technical side of filmmaking, I knew next to nothing about film
history, theory and criticism. What I had learned was from
Ross Devenish, director of some of Athol Fugard's films,
with whom I taught a film course in 1977. I had previously attended a
short course on cinema at Wits with John van Zyl, who later
set up the School of Dramatic Art at Wits. It was Ross who
had introduced me to Third Cinema and its accompanying theory, which I
am still teaching to this day. While at Wits (1997-1981) I
registered for an MA in film studies and it was there that I
obtained a more comprehensive knowledge about cinema theory
and history.

One
of my MA projects involved research on the South African
film industry. This early essay, drawing on my professional experience,
was published as The South African Film Industry
(African Studies Institute, Wits, 1979). Though the book
was a very cheap production, and theoretically very thin, it
sold fast and furiously, and garnered intelligent and enormous press,
radio and TV publicity. It was reprinted in 1980 and again
in a revised edition in 1981. A few years later I met Dan
Georgakas, an editor Cineaste, the US magazine on film and politics. Geogakas offered to publish The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film
(Smyrna: New York, and Lake View Press: Chicago) appeared
in 1988. This title was an immediate critical success internationally
and I was greatly honoured to have been the recipient of a
KWANZAA Award. The international rights were sold to
Routledge, though this edition is now out of print. Intervention Press
in Denmark has the European rights.

The Cinema of Apartheid
was surprisingly well received by sections of the South
African film industry, though it is highly critical of it.
(The book had obtained endorsement from veteran anti-apartheid
activists, novelist Nadine Gordimer and the exiled poet,
Denis Brutus.) The reason for this surprisingly positive
response from an otherwise ideologically conservative industry was
partly because the book explains the way the industry worked
under apartheid, in language which could be understood by
professionals. To some extent, aspects of the book also voiced their own
concerns. My direct experience of the industry, and of
labour issues via my work for the SA Film and TV Technicians
Association, told them that this was not ivory tower writing,
but a description and explanation o f actual conditions and processes
in which they were themselves participants. People could
recognize themselves in my analysis.

A journal which I started in 1980, Critical Arts , contributed to the systematic development of critical media and drama studies in South Africa. Critical Arts then provided the only domestic
outlet for sustained theoretical critique of the South
African media. As a result of the international prominence
that this journal earned in a short period, I found myself at the
helm of a publication - and a host of progressive co-editors and
authors - which mapped out the critical history and
strategies for anti-apartheid mobilization within the
academic media and cultural sectors. Earlier, I had been involved in the
technicians' union as an executive council member and then
chairman. So, my contribution to the industry was both
academic and professional, incorporating labour and anti-apartheid
issues.

I
have continued to publish extensively on the South African
film and TV industries in books and journals. I wrote the historical
section in the "Film" chapter in the Arts and Culture Task Group Report and was a co-writer (with Martin Botha, and a number of professional advisors) of the Film White Paper which was published in 1996. The White Paper
aimed to restructure the South African film industry to
meet the needs of the new democratic order. (A version of
this White Paper has also been presented to the
Zimbabwean government by that country's industry). The work I was
invited to do on the White Paper was a rare
honour: not many academics have the privilege of putting
their theories into practice via democratic policy-making at the level
of the state itself. Seeing one's life's work take an
affirmative and democratic direction is a once in a
life-time experience. It gives meaning to life, to struggle, and to the
(regrettably declining) notion of "public service".

One
of the proudest moments for me after apartheid was when
Lionel Ngakane was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of
Natal in 1997. I had personally motivated Lionel's
nomination for this award. Lionel is a powerhouse in African
cinema, constantly facilitating, always encouraging, developing and
exploring new avenues for African cinema. Most people
nowadays are devoted to building their own careers and PR
images; Lionel continues to contribute to the development of others, and
the industry as a whole. He, of course, played a major role
in formulation of the White Paper

WS:Broadcasting
is currently going through a major revolution in Southern
Africa in terms of who "rules the airwaves". What are your
feelings regarding the recent successful bid by Midi TV (of
which Warner Bros owns 20%) to operate South Africa's first free- to-air
commercial television station?

Tomaselli:
Seven consortia (most with international partners) bid for
the license. All the bidders had involved black empowerment
interests. Midi's shareholding is 80% black-owned. Midi TV will
broadcast 24 hours a day, and include a news service, which
is not part of the line-up of M-Net, the pay-TV channel.
Significantly, M-Net in late 1996 came under primarily black control and
owns about 4% of Canal Plus in France. The growth of
black-dominated South African capital in the South African
media industries has been phenomenal. The entre` by Midi TV continues
this black empowerment trend, which started in 1993, though it
would have occurred with any of the bidding consortia.

The
inclusion of Warner Bros, part of the Time-Warner stable,
has raised eyebrows in South Africa. This was because this US company
came on board very late in the bidding process. Also, Midi
was permitted by the Independent Broadcasting Authority,
against bidding regulations, to modify its business plan at a very
late stage . (The Authority has been dogged with allegations of
corruption and incompetence since it was established in
1994.)

Warner
offered to buy the maximum (20%) of the proposed Midi
company permitted by South African law. While the other bidders had long
included foreign partners, a veritable rogue's gallery of
media moguls, the current era of globalisation makes this
international cooperation inevitable. To secure programming is
one thing; to secure global markets for locally made product is much
more difficult. A foreign partner is useful for raising the
necessary capital injection and meeting start-up costs, and
for top class management expertise, affordable programming, and export
opportunities.

One
consequence is that trivial American product might may find
another outlet to clutter up yet another South African channel (five
South African channels existed prior to Midi going on air,
three of which were free-to-air). Fortunately, the purile
playground smut that passes for day-time entertainment in USA
network TV is currently not that evident on any South African TV
channel. And, in any case, local content provisions reserve
at least a minimum of 20% airtime for South African
productions (excluding news and sport). But the themes may not be
necessarily South African in orientation. The local content
provisions have to be enforced by the IBA. Whether or not
Midi gets on-air in October 1998 as intended depends on whether the
other bidders take the IBA to court for allegedly breaching
the tendering procedures with regard to the Midi
application.

The
national public broadcaster in particular is going to have
to develop programming strategies to ensure that relevant social issues
remain the pre-eminent topics for social debate. The SABC
will have to work hard and creatively to retain viewers in
its attempts open up and develop the public sphere. The quality of our
hard-earned democracy partly depends on the audience impact
of the public service broadcaster. Private commercial
broadcasters always pander to the lowest common
denominators, no matter their protestations to the contrary.
Regrettably, profit always comes before the polity.

WS: Considering the ideological changes in South Africa, where is the pre-election socialist rhetoric in film?

Tomaselli :
Socialism is no longer on the agenda in South African
politics. The world into which South Africa re-emerged in 1990
after decades of sanctions and boycotts had also witnessed the
collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The demise of apartheid was
connected to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armed
struggle was replaced by negotiation. In a post-Cold War world in which
capital now reigns supreme, and which has seen the rise of
global entertainment and information industries, there is
currently very little space for socialist mobilisation. A Luta continua,
but the terrain of this struggle is now to limit
corruption, to make politicians accountable to the people,
and to create growth policies which benefit everyone, not just
the few who wield political and economic power.

In writing up the White Paper on Film
the Reference Committee appointed by the Minister, for
example, grappled with clauses and criteria to discourage
corruption, nepotism and selfish accumulation. We proposed a series
of funding measures to facilitate the entrance into the industry
of new producers, new directors, new exhibitors and new
distributors. One of the objectives is to facilitate new
entrants into all sectors of the industry, and to provide seed funding
and venture capital (in partn ership with industry) in
stimulating new and critical themes. Audience development is
a key factor in this strategy. Econonmic growth, jobs and sectoral
development are also key objectives. But it is early days yet,
and the mechanism to facilitate this, t he South African
film and Video Foundation, has yet to be established.

The
themes which are currently emerging from both the film and
TV industries are far more positively intercultural than previously.
They are far more nuanced, and far more broadly South
African than they have ever been. The SABC, in particular,
has seized the initiative. Amongst the TV genres which work towards
reconciliation and development are:

drama series which re-examine inter-racial relations during apartheid (Homeland);

docudramas on key anti-apartheid figures (like Alan Paton); and

magazine
programmes which represent the full spectrum of South
African politics from the far left to the far right.

In cinema, the Afrikaans-language film, Paljas
(1997), about small town Afrikaners, was financed by Anant
Singh, a South African producer of Indian descent, and
directed by a white Afrikaner, Katinka Heyns. Paljas
was nominated for an Academy Award in 1998 by a multi-racial
South African committee, under the auspices of the
Independent Producers Organisation chaired by Mfundi Vundla.
This is where the real change has occurred. Intercultural
communication, resolving the divisions caused by apartheid,
reconciliation, and a critical interrogation of social
prejudices and racism are high on the agenda. Socialist themes might
well return, however, if the current centralisation of
wealth accumulation continues at the expense of a broader
redistribution.

WS: What about black consciousness?

Black
Consciousness (BC) as humanistically articulated by Steve
Biko continues in a racially exclusive form within the Azanian Peoples
Organisation (AZAPO). AZAPO claimed the mantle of Biko's
Black peoples Convention after his death. The strategic
value of BC was initially revealed in Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, shot in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, and in the Zimbabwean-made documentary, Biko:Breaking the Silence
(made by Olley Maruma, Richard Wickstead and Mark Kaplan).
The latter film explained the shift after Soweto '76 from BC to
Charterism, a mildly socialist, non-racial, philosophy drawn
from the Freedom Charter (1955).

AZAPO
is a small, intellectually-based group, whose emphases have
been largely supplanted by the racial inclusivism of Charterism as
propounded by the United Democratic Front of the 1980s, and
Nelson Mandela's policy of non-racialism in the 1990s.
Central to this notion of the "rainbow nation", as described
by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is the political strategy of
reconciliation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is
the central mechanism facilitating absolution for political
crimes carried out in the name of ideology, no matter the identity of
perpetrator or victims.

Since
the post-apartheid moment is dominated by the policies of
reconciliation, absolution and the building of a single non-racial
nation, issues incubated within BC circles have not yet made
their appearance in post-apartheid cinema and broadcast TV.
Now that the black majority wields political power, and in the
light of the speed with which black capital is being integrated into
the national (and international) economies, BC may have to
reorientate itself to address the new class dynamics which
have come about since 1990.

WS: Where do concepts regarding orality in African cinema fit into your writing on film and video?

One
of the advantages of the post-boycott era is that South
Africans now regularly get to see African-made movies. The Film Resource
Unit in Johannesburg, which is engaged in audience
development projects, and the All Africa M-Net Film Awards,
now bring these films south. The national public broadcaster has been
showing African films weekly, and M-Net has been screening
these films as well. For the first time South Africans are
now privy to the cinema of their African colleagues to the north.

My writing on orality and South African film started in the late 1980s. Documentary films such as The Two Rivers
and a number on popular storytellers like Mzwakhe Mbuli and
Gcina Mhlope, required different analytical perspectives
from those found in conventional documentary film theory. The Two Rivers,
for example, is structured in terms of poet Rashaka Ratshitanga's oral
testimony about Venda history and the interpenetration of
African and Western cultures in Johannesburg. The films on
the storytellers are themselves sometimes structured in terms
of the oral. A video on which I worked as a cameraman, I am Clifford Abrahams, This is Grahamstown
(1994), is edited in terms of Cliffie's own oral tale about
his poverty-stricken life in Grahamstown. Another video I shot, Kat River - The End of Hope (1974), has become a cause celebre
with regard to a spontaneous Lament uttered by an elderly
coloured peasant farmer about to be dispossessed by land
consolidation under apartheid. This Lament, by an illiterate, has
been compared in structure by a scholar of orality to laments
uttered by anguished European peasants of the 13th century
also undergoing extreme hardships. It was this scholar of
orality who actually unlocked the latent linguistic significance of the
Lament.

Your
question, of course, primarily refers to my more recent
co-authored writing relating also to cinema made by West African
directors. Africa is still comprised of people who exhibit
varying cultures of orality, semi-literacy, and total
literacy. As such, African directors often find themselves interfacing
between oral and literate worlds. Tensions between tradition
and modernity in the post-colonial era dominate West
African films in particular. Literacy ensures continued economic and
often cultural dependency on the Western metropoles (as in,
eg., Jean-Marie Teno's Afrique, Je Te Le Plumerai).
To understand these kinds of films in terms of their own
historical contexts, it is necessary to introduce theories of orality to
film analysis. Orality helps to explain their episodic,
often disjointed, lateral narratives, which break with
Hollywood linear conventions of beginning, middles and ends. The film, Keita
, for example, has no beginning, middle or end! The
extraordinary experiences I had on videoing Cliffie and Piet
Draghoender (in Kat River) sensitised me to these different ways of making sense of the world, history and experience.

WS:
You mentioned Cry Freedom. I played Thenjiwe Mtintso in
that film. Back to Black Consciousness and visual representations in
Post-Apartheid Southern Africa. Do you think, the current
positive production climate in Southern Africa will finally
produce images and "collective memory" of Southern African
blacks, that is authentic and original or do you think Southern Africa
is currently going through a post- neo colonial scramble.
Cheap locations, perfect light 365 days a year, cheap
starving natives who will work for anything, wild exotic animals,
natives who are still too savage to actually be the true
protagonists and heroes of the films. Tell us Keyan is the
industry in Southern Africa concerned about these issues?

Tomaselli:
Film makers from both South Africa and elsewhere did cash
in on the struggle against apartheid during the 1980s.
White, vicious, Afrikaans-speaking characters were cast as the `bad
guys' in a number of US titles. Unlike the USA which has
been pursuing its exorcism regarding Vietnam via its film
industry, South Africans want to move on: The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission is the vehicle which is providing a forum for
absolution for the horrors of the past. Film makers are
going back to roots, and developing themes on reconciliation, local
histories, and identity, as seen in Paljas , Sarafina , Cry the Beloved Country, and the TV shows I mentioned above.

Since
the new film legislation is still in its infancy, things
will take a while to develop. Original treatments about local issues and
histories have been a feature of short videos made by
students from the Newtown Film and TV School, broadcast on
SABC, and the young directors who have contributed to the M-Net New
Directions series. These young directors still have to make
their mark, and will do so increasingly in the next few
years.

But the
factors you mention - cheap labour, sunny skies, wildlife
and top class production facilities, will continue to attract foreign
films like the Ghost in the Darkness and
the new TV series on Tarzan shot last year at the Lost City
location at the infamous Sun City complex. Here are South Africans in a
paper mache` environments built on myths about Africa
claiming that these productions represent the `real' Africa.
What the Film White Paper Reference Group is hoping for is
that the income earned from these kinds of commercial productions will
help to contribute to the building of a more relevant cinema
relating directly and critically to South African themes.
This is a key provision in the proposed film financing mechanism. It's a
sort of ying-yang financial relationship in an era when
governments want to get out of subsidising business
operations.

WS: There
seems to be this sense that "new" South Africans" are
cashing in and openly dealing with those who were once the
enemy. Does this contradiction play itself out in the media arena in
South Africa ?

The
whole point of the ANC policy regarding nation-building,
reconciliation and economic growth is that there are no more enemies -
only constituencies. As I pointed out above, despite numerous
teething problems, our new economy, unlike Zimbabwe's is
rapidly becoming multi-racial as black and white dominated
capitals interpenetrate on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange especially .
Black empowerment schemes via the Stock Exchange, and via
other mechanisms have brought black-owned capital (mobilised
via the union pension funds) into the national economy, and via this
stake, into the global economy, especially with regard to
media. So, M-Net, Midi-TV, Times Media, the Sowetan, the
Metro Cinemas, and numerous radio stations, and so on are now largely
controlled by black-owned capital. However, this does not mean
that these companies will automatically make space for
African content. While local content provision on television
ranges from 20-40 percent, there are no such provisions in cinema
distribution. The SABC and, to a lesser extent, M-Net, are
really playing the most important role vis-a-vis local
content. They are also bringing films from the rest of Africa to our TV
screens, and to the cinema and the home video market via the
Film Reseource Unit.

WS: What is the most memorable thing you take back with you from Sabbatical in the US?

One
of my tasks here at Michigan State University has been my
work, ongoing since 1990, with the African Media Program, a division of
the African Studies Center. The Program is developing
synopses and critiques of film, TV and video by African film
makers. We are also developing critiques on other media on and about
Africa, by non-African directors. The intention is to place
this educational data base on the World Wide Web. In this
small way we hope to provide instantly accessible and accurate
information to American educators looking for appropriate movies for
use in classroom teaching. In 1997 at the African Literature
Association conference on African Films, scores of papers
were given by American professors on the topic. This growing interest in
African expression provides the kind of base line which the
African Media Program hopes to enhance. Also, innovative
policy is now being put into place by President Clinton
following his discussions with African leaders during his recent tour to
that continent. This suggests a much more sophisticated
understanding of the foreign policy issues involved. We may
well be moving to a new plane of American foreign relations with Africa.
It's just a pity that the US network media continues to
trivilise and senationalise everything on which it reports.

WS:
What are your immediate or future plans in South Africa?
Planning on making any films or any new publications ? What is the role
you are keen on playing?

Tomaselli:
We are still reconstructing all aspects of our society.
Universities in particular are having a difficult time of it,
as funds are cut, and academics who are unused to the need for regular
restructuring as has occurred elsewhere, have to become
more entrepreneurial and adapt to constantly changing
circumstances. The Centre in which I am professor, however, has
continuously adapted to this financially austere climate.
Our MA in Media Studies has been a great success, with our
students coming from all over Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and the
USA. This year we introduced for the first time two
undergraduate certificate courses in media studies, and we
are now planning a whole undergraduate degree programme. So, while
other disciplines contract, we are actually growing to meet the
demands of the new media developments described above.

Also,
most of our lecturers and even some senior students have
been directly involved in government policy-making regarding media.
Others have worked with African development agencies across
the continent. One of the projects with which I am engaged
is the Training in Developing Countries Board (TDC). TDC is a
sub-committee of CILECT, the International Association of Film and TV
Schools, based in Brussels. The TDC was responsible for the
establishment of the Zimbabwe-UNESCO Film Training Project.
My hope is that this Project could become the locus for a SADC Film, TV,
video and multimedia training project, in which all the
public educational institutions within the SADC area
participate.

The
transition from apartheid to democracy has been an exciting
(and exhausting) time for all of us. The exhilaration we all feel in
actively participating in the democratic process has been an
empowering experience all round. I will return to South
Africa in mi-1998 feeling recharged and keen to carry on with
reconstruction and development in those sectors in which I and members
of my Centre in Durban have been so active.

ENDS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Keyan
Gray Tomaselli is Professor, Graduate Programme in Cultural
and Media Studies, University of Natal, South Africa. This interview
was conducted while he was a Visiting Professor in the
African Studies Center, and the Departments of Anthropology
and English, Michigan State University, USA. Tomaselli was
working on the MSU African Media Project, and teaching courses in Third
World cinema and documentary film.

Author of The Cinema of Apartheid (Smyrna Press, New York), Tomaselli co-wrote the South African government White Paper on Film
(1996), and was responsible for drawing up the Department
of Health's Guidelines (1997) for a national AIDS media
strategy which mobilizes grassroots participation via action
research and participatory communication. His most recent book,
Appropriating Images: the Semiotics of Visual Representation
(Intervention Press, Denmark) offers an analysis of visual
imaging of Africans from largely Third World and African perspectives.

Tomaselli
has served on the juries of the Milano Festival for African
Cinema, Riminicinema, and as a judge for the All Africa M-Net Film
Awards. He has been the guest of film festivals in France,
Canada, the USA and South Africa.

John Cundill talks to Keyan and Ruth Tomaselli

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1983
Other Authors: Ruth Tomaselli
Published: In The SAFTTA Journal, December 1985 Vol. 5 Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 10-17.
Type of Product: The SAFTTA Journal was published by the SA Film and TV Technicians Association.
Copyright: Authors
John Cundill is a graduate of University of Cape Town
Drama Department and worked as a journalist on The Star. He
has become one of the South Africa’s most incisive
television scriptwriters. In this interview with Keyan and
Ruth Tomaselli conducted on 6th July 1983, he talks about
some of his projects and his relationships with the SABC.
While much of what he says has since been superceded by
events, this conversation is reproduced here to capture an
oral history of aspects of South African media practices.
Much of what Cundill says remains pertinent ,
particularly in the light of the rescreening of The Villagers which he commenced in October 1985.

Interview

Perhaps
we could start the discussion with Oh George and your
rather disappointed response at the press critics who
interpreted the series on a superficial level only.
Through your characters and in the way you had structured
the narrative, you're actually making a comment on the
South African situation; much as you did with some episodes of
The Villagers. Let's talk about the characters in
terms of the stereotyping first. I remember discussions
with some of my colleagues who complained that 'people
don't talk like that', whereas in fact they DO talk like
that.

What
I saw in my imagination seemed to me to be funny. I could
see where we went wrong, but overall I thought the thing
was working as comedy. So I was startled to read so many
devastatingly negative critiques in the papers. People
were really taking it apart and saying how on earth could
one put on this dreadful rubbish! I could not accept that it
was that bad. There is always a conflict between what the critics
say, and public response. As far as one can judge by the
audience figures it was successful in that it was one of
the top ten programmes throughout its 26 week run. Now
this isn't necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a
measure of something. I think in mass media terms, it has
to be a measure of success. I would rather something I
wrote were popular with the public and unpopular with the
critics than the other way around.

To
what extent do you think the critics were responding to
Oh George as a South African production? One wonders
whether they would've had the same kind of attitude to an
American production which set the characters in a
comparable American situation?

I
think there was a kind of anti-South African bias --
'because it's local it can't be that good'. That is the
first point: that there was just a total difference in my
opinion and the opinion of most of the people who wrote
about Oh George, as to whether the thing worked in terms
of comedy. The other point that worried me was that I felt
I got no credit. I (or we, if I include director Gray
Hofmeyr, with whom I discussed the thing a lot), never got any
credit for what I thought was something of a breakthrough. In our
uniquely sensitive South African situation we were the
first to cast Afrikaner, English-speaking, Jewish and
black South Africans in one situation. For the first time
ever on our television we had blacks who weren't simply
tokens; they were people with opinions and who had a
significant role to play.

In
one episode, involving fantasies in which we saw what was
going on in the minds of our different characters, we had
the black general factotum seated in the lounge wearing a
smart suit and his Afrikaner "boss", being his servant.
At one point the black man came in and asked Tokkie, the
Afrikaner, if he'd like his sports jacket because it was
getting old and didn't fit him any more. Tokkie replies:
"O, ja, thank you very much, gee whiz, that's fantastic!"
and off he goes thinking he's got a good deal: in other
words, the reversal of the usual situation. I thought that
was quite a daring thing to do in the South African context.

In
another episode we had Tokkie's old university friend, a
very uptight verkrampte, visiting him. This meeting made
Tokkie feel that he was a little far from the fire in
Afrikaner society. We gathered from this, although it was
never made specific that Tokkie's problem was that he
wasn't a member of the Broederbond. This guy was and he had all
the right connections and the right attitudes. Tokkie tried to
impress him and the more he tried to impress him the more the
thing just came to grief and his facade fell through.
Well, I thought that was breaking new ground too, and I
was pleased and proud with the way that we did it, and I
thought it was funny. But I don't know of a single paper
that picked that up and gave us any credit for it. In the
end you have to rely on your own judgement and I think
that my judgement was right and they were wrong.

We're
getting to the heart of the matter now; we were quite
intrigued with your use of the black characters, the
general factotum and the maid, to make a comment on
Ponderosa as an allegory of South Africa, with the
characters standing for the various social groups. This is
particularly evident in the scene where the general factotum is
standing in as a proxy vote for George at the condiminium
committee meeting. What kind of response did you get from the
SABC in your use of the general factotum particularly?

No
response whatsoever. Now, again this was quite
interesting because one is aware of the sensitivity of the
situation when working for the SABC. But you never know;
there is no clear line drawn on precisely how far one can
go, or how far you cannot go. Nobody has ever spelt that
out and nobody ever will. The only way to really find out
where that line is, is to try something and see if you can
get away with it. We were really quite nervous of the
Broedebond episode; we thought there would be some come-back-on
that. But not a word ... there was not a squeak out of anybody.

Has there ever been a “squeak” coming back from the SABC on things that you've done?

The
only one that I can think of was an episode in The
Villagers which dealt with mining conditions for black
miners. I don't know how official the response was, but
again that episode was transmitted because we never made a
fuss and we never told anybody what we were planning. But
the Head of the English Drama Department did tell me
afterwards to “Cool it.” I don’t know to what extent that
reflected senior official thinking in the corporation. Somebody
must've mentioned it to him, but from how high up I don't know.

Gray
Hofmeyr and I have just done a feature length programme.
It's his story, but I wrote the script and developed it.
It's called The Outcast and it has to do with three
brothers in the Knysna Forest. Two of them were white and
the third brother is coloured. He is cast out of the home by
his elder brother. He engineers the death of his two white
brothers and the two women involved leave. The coloured brother
finally takes over their house. The symbolism is quite strong.
This the SABC did know about because they invited
suggestions for drama projects which they could enter that
year for the Prix Italia, a prestige event. They felt -he
SABC should show what they can do or what South Africa
can do. We put the story in synopsis form and to our
surprise it was accepted. Well, in the course of making
it, it even got stronger in a way -- you know the sort of
innuendos and subtleties which can slip in: for example, you see a
white guy trying to beat

the
hell out of his coloured brother who is being treated as
an outcast, as inferior. In the end the SABC were
absolutely delighted with the result and I won an Akademie
award for the script!

One thing that struck us about that absolutely abominable series of Scottie Smith,
was the ease with which father, presented the two
brothers -- one coloured and one white. He kept referring
to them as “my boys". That comes across very easily
without any sense of the social or racial conflict evident
in The Outcast.

You mean it's just so natural it isn't true?

Well,
except that the credits did make it clear that Scottie
Smith is loosely based on a real character.

But
perhaps you could comment on our opinion that the SABC is
not a monolithic Broederbond-directed and controlled
operation which only puts out one point of view; that in
fact there are spaces to create oppositional points of
view or to criticise even what the SABC stands for Now
that's obviously not necessarily true of news, magazine or
documentary programmes, but critical space can be
exploited in narrative...

I
think it happens mainly because of the amorphous
structure of such a big corporation, that nobody can be
watching everything all the time.

You
make the narrative work at two levels: the level of
appearance, which seems to be the level at which most of
the critics responded to Oh George, and a deeper level
where subtleties and allegory can come through.
Paradoxically, the most independent of all the women was
Tokkie's Afrikaans-speaking wife. What we're asking is, did
you deliberately encode allegory into the script?

I
never go into a project saying, "Now I must write an
allegorical reflection of South Africa." It's just
something that happens in the writing. I realised from the
way the script was developing that it was possible to say
something by casting Tokkie as a verkrampte and his wife
as the verligte to develop the conflict between them --
just between them as a couple.

To what extent is the SABC aware of the double entendre’s that result from your writing?

I
honestly don't know and I don't try to find out. I’ve
been very careful in saying anything to the press about
The Outcast, because I'm sure if
headlines appear saying "Great Controversial Play Due To Be
Screened", then the SABC people upstairs are sudden1y going
to start getting twitchy and think "Crikey, what ' s this? We’d
better find out more about it and have somebody preview it”.
Instead of the decision being left at Ronnie Wilson's
level, then it goes to Pieter de Bruyn, or possibly even
higher than that-- and the higher it goes I think the
twitchier people get because then there are all sorts of
political ramifications that creep in.

The
fewer possibilities of veto, the better chances you have
of pushing what you particularly want...

And
also, there's no doubt about it. I operate at a
particular advantage because of what I've already done.

Because
of my track record they're more inclined to say,
Cundill’s done it, it's probably ok." If an unknown writer
had presented the same script it would be looked at more
carefully.

Obviously
you have a great deal of interaction with the producer,
who translates your ideas into actions. If any, what sort
of influence do the actors or actresses have? Do they
develop a character beyond what's on the script or ...

Not
really. I have a very clear idea of a character on paper,
but the actor does flesh that character out and sometimes
adds nuances to the character, not by putting in extra
lines or anything like that, but simply because their own
personality to a certain extent is added to the fictional
character.

When you're writing, do you have a specific actor in mind?

No,
but it does make it easier once you have, say, Gordon
Mulholland in mind. To write Hilton MaCrae after Gordon
Mulholland had done the first twenty-six episodes of The
Villlagers, was so easy; and now as Warren Bartlett in
Westgate, I know pecisely how Gordon is going to speak a line. It's much easier to visualise.

Does the second of a series, for instance, Westgate 2, have a momentum that the first does have?

Definitely.
And in another dimension the actors do start having an
effect on the way the script will go in a sequel. If
they're good you want to develop them and make more of
them, and if they're disappointing you want to make less
of them, or maybe get rid of them altogether. If you know
that an actor, particularly someone like Sandra Duncan,
playing Muriel in Westgate, is doing it so well, and the
actress's enthusiasm and interest in the part and wanting
to do more is evident -- that is reflected in the way the
story continues (as in Westgate 111).

Some
of our colleagues were lamenting the fact, well,
ironically this time, that you hadn't picked up those
peculiar South African accents that you had in Oh George.
The accents, instead of the phony Kerzner-type drawl were
more middle class, non-accented and lacking in cultural
and locational specificity.

Westgateconflicts
with something I believe in strongly, and that is, we
should be writing about South Africa specifically: South
African people, South African stories. God knows, we have enough
of them here. But Westgatewent against this. It
started right from the beginning, when Colin du Plessis
was Head of Drama said “We've just had Rich Man, Poor Man
which was so successful, can't you write us a local one of
those?" From the beginning, I thought in terms of an
international type show, and I could see the possibility
of overseas sales, and me making a bit of money out of it
which helps if you're a scriptwriter in this country. So
the whole thing right from the start was pitched at an
international type of show. It wasn’t an intrinsically
South African story.

Another Problem was that the critics tended to inappropriately compare Westgate with Dallas ...

That was unfair because the first series was written before Dallas even came on the screen. Westgatewas filmed after Dallas had been shown.

So
the producer was most likely influenced by the
cinematography? Nevertheless, at a deeper narrative level,
each of the characters represent broader social conflicts
in South Africa. The vagueness of the geographical
location, for example, provided a vehicle for social
criticism which might have been prevented had you actually
located the homeland or that black state in the first episode in
South Africa. Here you played up the South African racist types
who dance with blacks in neighbouring states' but who vote
Nationalist in South Africa, who'll gamble at casinos but
who would be morally and religiously affronted should the
casino be located in South Africa proper. The way you
sent up the Minister of Agriculture of the black state who
could, like any pleb, be dredged up at short notice, when
the South African cabinet minister was unable to open the
advertising conference, is surely a comment on the
political situation of Southern Africa?

Yes, that was deliberate. I'm sorry we didn't make more of that.

This
is also evident in your treatment of the Sanderveldt
Foundation. The implication is that big business hides its
greed behind altruistic facades created by public
relations companies ...

Yes,
but I don't think that's a specifically South African
thing. I think that is the ugly face of capitalism…

There
was one scene where the creative guys were unsuccessfully
trying to put together an advertising campaign for
self-rising cake. Along comes Warren Bartlett and says
"Break an egg". Was that intuitive, or was that based on
something that you had heard?

I pinched it out of a book.

(Ruth)
When I was an advertising research executive we ran a
series of workshops on cake mixes (God, what one does in
advertising!). One of our clients came up with the idea of
'breaking an egg'. There was a very strong feeling in the
workshops that by using cake mixes that women were being
cheated of their domestic roles. The idea of 'break an egg'
was to restore womens' confidence in their male dominated domestic
submission.

That
I did pinch. The one that was entirely my own was the
black washing powder. I have an idea and I feel my way
into it. It grows and develops and you know you're going
along the right track. But you know that track you're on
anyway is already defined by your background, your own
interests, your perceptions of your environment-- it all has to
come of that.

I
do know what I want to do but I don't plan a script or
structure a story to make that point at the end.

It's
not a high-brow intellectual pursuit in this respect. I
believe the theatre is different. Beyond that, of course,
one seeks to give television as much quality a s possible
in terms of writing, the characterisation, and the
strength of the storyline. If beyond that one can subtly
get in some point that does give the series some extra meaning and
dimension in the context of South Africa, well, that's a bonus
which I'm certainly happy to achieve if it arises out of
all the other things happening first.

Did you write the episodes in sequence?

When
you're doing the first series, you have all the time in
the world. There is a date on the contract, but

the
SABC don't worry too much about that, because at that
stage you don't even know for certain if the series is
going to be produced. The. reason why Westgatewas
filmed after Dallas came on, and was written before
Dallas even started, was that it lay around the SABC for two years
before they gave it to an outside film producer. Now a sequel
is different in terms of scheduling. One has to clear the
decks immediately. The script has to be written under
fairly severe deadlines. With Westgate 11 I was unable to
finish writing it before they started shooting the first
sequences. So I had to write it out of sequence, but in
the sequence in which they were filming it. They wanted to
do all the Cape Town sequences first, before the rain
started. So all the scenes that happen in Cape Town I had
to write first. Then they scheduled to go to Lesotho, to
do what we called Letswana; those sequences were written next.
Then we did all of those of Ivor Kraft, in the mental hospital.
The entire sequel was written totally out of sequence. But,
and this is the important point: I did structure the
entire story from start to finish. I knew what the
beginning was and what the end was. All the master scenes
were plotted in advance, but no dialogue was written.

Most American series employ teams of scriptwriters, story editors, story consultants and so on.Were you the sole scriptwriter on Westgate?

I wrotethe
first two series from start to finish. It's just too much
for one guy. Thirteen one-hour episodes is equivalent to
about six or seven feature movies --I've only got six
months to do Westgate III. Creatively one
feels limited: one needs input from other people. I will
be writing it, but I’m going to be looking around for
contributions from other writers. What I’m hoping to do is
to move into the role of the script editor, and have other
contributing writers working with me, collaborating on the
project.

(Keyan)
I was a little disappointed with The Earth Mover in that
it didn't seem to get beyond the employer/employee
relationship. I was perhaps expecting something more
allegorical, a more South African situation to come
through…

There
was no intention to push it much. Further than that. The
situation was delicate-where else in the world does a
white man get promoted against his, will because of the
colour of his skin? This is a marvelous situation, and I
thought that alone would be enough for a story. Again to my
surprise the SABC went ahead with it, but it was filmed and
completed before anybody of any real seniority knew what was
happening. It's quire possible that a lot of people didn't
realise that the guy who was allocated to take his job was
actually a black man . The earth mover should have been
more clearly in shock, we should have seen his reactions
and possibly heard what he had to say about it. If we’d
done that it would have been a stronger and more
successful story.

The
job reservation idea didn't come through very strongly.
The one question that you did not resolve was why the
bulldozer driver was being promoted…

We slipped up.

Was the idea written into the original script?

Gray
and I we were so afraid the programme wouldn't go out
that we fudged it to the point that ... well, if you
missed it, then we fudged it very badly. Not that we
didn't want, people to miss it, but we didn't want to make a big
issue of it. But it should've been clear that this was the
reasons. In fact, this is an actual situation: the reallocation
of jobs is being done for good altruistic reasons. The
irony, the tragedy of the story was supposed to be that
everybody was trying their best to improve everybody's
situation. But because of the peculiar bizarre
circumstances in which we operate in this country, the
white okie lost out totally. It could've been the other
way round of course; it could've been the black guy losing
his job. Anyway, it was supposed to be a look at how
bizarre the situation is here and to show how it can all go wrong
and in fact end in tragedy.

Why did you think the SABC might object to this theme as opposed to previous things you’ve done?

I’m
not quite sure I will relate it to something that is
happening now. My latest project is the 1922 miners
strike*. The reason for that strike was exactly what the
conflict is about right now: that the mines won’t allow
blacks to do skilled jobs, particularly they won’t give them
blasting tickets. A miner really can’t become a miner until he
can do that. Again this hasn’t been taken very high up in the
SABC, and nobody is really aware of how sensitive this whole
thing is. We have spoken to the Chambers of Mines about
it. Edgar Bold’s policy was to tell them about the project
so that they knew what we were doing so that when we
asked them if we could film on their mines, they would
make things easier and say yes. Well, to our surprise the
Chamber of Mines just freaked out about the series. They
said they wanted nothing whatsoever to do with it because it
touched on precisely what is going on at the moment with Arri
Paulus and his right wing backlash, and reinforced by what’s
happening at Waterberg elections. And on the other side the
black miners union is for the first time negotiating
wages. This hasnever happened before and the whole thing is just so touchy.

Where are you going to shoot it?

Rand
Mines have said ok. But it was dicey because could’ve
made things very difficult for us. Had they gone to the
SABC and said: "For God's sake, what are you doing?”--That
would've gone right director-general if not the Minister,
and the series might have been canceled. I'm quite sure
of that. So again we're taking the low road, to get there.
But in the process we to have to be careful in the way wehandle
it, because you can just go a little too far and that is,
to get back to The Earth Mover, we were afraid of just
overstepping the mark and losing everything, instead of getting,
say, halfway to where we would like to have been. But in the
process of getting halfway I accept it wasn’t successful.

The Earth Moverhad
the most strange response. People thought that it was the
best thing they had seen on South African television. There were
people who were knocked out about it, and there were people like
you, who weren’t. Quite a few letters were published in
the Afrikaans papers. ( I didn’t see all the critiques). A
lot of Afrikaners thought that it was bad news, that the
Afrikaner was being belittled in that show, and that I was
deliberately trying to knock the Afrikaner. I was amazed,
I thought we portrayed a sympathetic character.

My other criticism was the totally predictable ending...

That
was stuck on right at the end. Gray came along and
thought it was just too heavy… (there is much laughter
from John). Well, he talked me into it and we went for it.
Oh well, it happens.

PRODUCED, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY KEVIN HARRIS FOR THE SOUTH AFRICAN COUNCIL OF CHURCHES.
CAMERAMEN: Desmond Burmeister and Peter Tischauser
ASSISTANT CAMERAMEN: Clive Sacke, George Bartels and Paul Otten
SOUND: Mark Engels and Sean Murdoch
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Lesley Kowal

Kevin
Harris is a freelance writer-director working mainly in
the field of documentary filmmaking. In the interview
which follows, he is talking to Stephen Coan. This We Can Do For Justice and Peace
is one of a number of films that Kevin has made since his
noisy departure from the Documentary Department of
SABC-TV. The interview and the film both reflect his
pioneering spirit and determination to make authentic
films about South Africa for South Africans.

Interview

What is the subject of This We Can Do For Justice and Peace?

It
is a film that gives the South African Council of
Churches’ statement about the situation in South Africa.
It features Bishop Desmond Tutu, General Secretary of the
South African Council of Churches (SACC) and also the
Reverend Peter Storey who is the President of the SACC. It
presents their point of view on South Africa today - where it’s
heading and what we have to do in order to bring peaceful change.
And so prevent some kind of holocaust. It’s set against
the backdrop of re-locations - the phenomenon of mass
removals of black peoples from white areas into the
allocated Bantustans. This has been happening on a very
large scale over the past 30 years. Over two million
people have been moved.

Will the film be shown overseas?

Yes.
Once it is released and shown here it will go to the BBC.
But my priority intention in making films like this is
that they should be seen by South African audiences for
them to achieve their best effect. This is very difficult.
This non-commercial distribution is how we are trying to
make it happen. The other thing that is important about
this film is that it is a statement about South Africa that
expresses the urgent need for change and the re-assessment of the
political situation, and this statement is made by South
Africans. It isn’t an overseas assessment and from that
point it is valuable. It should be seen on the BBC - or
any other network for that matter - because if nothing
else it is a South African interpretation and it shows
very clearly that there are white South Africans living
here under the system who are working for change, however
small that group might be. Via the two spokesmen, Tutu and
Storey, the film presents a black perspective and a white
perspective - both with a common foundation in the SACC and a
common goal on the South African situation. The film expresses
anxieties of whites as well as the pain of blacks and this
dual perspective is a healthy one. It’s a positive film.

Positive in what way?

Well
again because of the media structure if you ask someone
“Tell me about Tutu?” they only know they don’t like him,
though they have no idea why. People would ask me: “How is
your film going on the, er, ANC?” to them it’s all the
same thing - terrorism and communism. Bishop Tutu somehow
gets to fall under the same heading. Through this film he
comes over as he is and that is a man who is committed to
working for peaceful change, a man who cares very deeply about
people of South Africa - he is religious man after all. His
commitment to peaceful change is so great that he is prepared to
go any length of personal sacrifice. This comes through
very strongly in the film and he talks about his vision of
South Africa with black and white living in harmony. The
film ends on that positive note. It’s not a depressing
thought unless you can’t accept the fact that one can live
with change in this country.

This
is the first documentary of this nature made in South
Africa by South Africans, as opposed to some outside
agency such as BBC or ITV. Is there a future for more
films of this kind?

I
think this film will be what decides that. There is very
definitely a need for this sort of film in South Africa.
The fact that it got made at all is something of a
success. Now the exposure it gets to audiences will be the
next measure of its success. If it is successful, others
will follow. It can only encourage other people who would be
interesting in working in this area that it is possible to do so.

The
following interview was conducted with Franz Marx at the Brigadier Film
Studios following the release of Weerskant die Nag and during the
editing of 40 days.

Some critics have charged that the story in Weerkskant is trite.

I
agree, the story is very slight. However, I did try to bring out good
characterization in the actors which is seldom seen in Afrikaans films.
All the characters were nicely drawn and the dialogue was written in
such a way that it had a good amount of interpretative value. I am
employed as a director, not a scriptwriter; therefore I may not always
be able to solve the problems of the original screenplay.

There was much adverse criticism regarding the expressionistic use of optical effects in this film.

The
freezes and flips bugged every critic. They bugged me more than
anybody. But we had this film on preview for the test audiences and they
couldn’t understand the transitions. We therefore had no option but to
include these opticals, otherwise the less sophisticated audience that
goes to Afrikaans films would not understand the sequence of events.

How were you going to edit the film originally?

Just straight cutting, like Julia. Unfortunately, the people we cater for don’t see films like Julia.
There are more modern ways of handling transitions, but these are out
of the scope of our local film laboratories. For example, they can’t do a
soft-cut or wash out the flashback scenes into different colour
schemes. They can’t do a blue screen process which is standard procedure
elsewhere.

‘n Seder val in Waterkloof was incisive and serious for the first two thirds. At the end it degenerated into a soap opera. Why?

Here
again I was responsible to a producer who demanded that the film be as
popular as the play which ran for nine months. Although I acted in the
play, I disagreed on the characterizations. But I was stuck with these
interpretations. Francois Swart who directed the play was not interested
in characters, but caricatures. On stage you can get away with that but
in the film I was stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

But then you lose the subtlety of the play, the conflict between the new Afrikaner and the old Afrikaner…

It
wasn’t a cinematic play to start off with. But the film worked
commercially. The ordinary people responded to the caricatures; to the
grossness. They were not interested in the new Afrikaner and the old
Afrikaner. They were just interested in the big boobs of …I’m sorry, but
that’s how it is.

The film you are working on at the moment isForty Days. Forty Days
deals with the extremes of what happens to young guys who have
completed their two-year army call-up. It features Hillbrow types who
verge on caricature, but not in the Seder vein. The
film tries to flesh out certain South African situations. Ultimately it
is much more a comment on your present society than Weerkskant could ever be.

Do
you deal with racial issues? Recently demobilized soldiers appear to
have assimilated a different set of social attitudes and racial
stereotypes in contrast to earlier generations who completed only 9
months in a peacetime situation.

Slight
references are made, e.g. one ex-serviceman says to a friend who was
not accepted for a particular job, “I know, it’s an old story –no
experience, no academic qualifications and the wrong colour skin for
manual labour”. We only touch the race problem obliquely.

Very
few South African films deal with the relationships between Blacks and
Whites in this country. It’s almost as if Blacks don’t exist.

I
think it would be unethical, unjust and wrong at this stage of the film
industry to even try to make a comment on something as big as the main
theme of this country’s political life, of the relationship between
Blacks and Whites etc. It can’t be done because we don’t know how to
handle it thematically. At the moment we can’t even handle the ordinary
love story. The big South African story which still has to be written
can have no other theme than that of colour. But we as film makers are
not yet mature enough to try to attempt this. Before we even start on
the colour theme we must first merge English and Afrikaans. I tried to
do that on Forty Days. I have reversed the everyday
process of using English slang on Afrikaans types, so that the
characters use English laced with Afrikaans slang. If this experiment
works then we must go back to the old bilingual style of film making. I
think it is a more authentic reflection of the way South Africans speak.

One
of the Rhetorical questions which continually raises its head is that
South African film has no identity. How would you define the components?

We
have no identity because most local film makers follow the auteur
approach. That is, the producer, author and director is one person. The
result is a personal statement catering for an Americanized audience. A
South African identity will only come through the studio system as
applied in America. Our audiences are unable to read the auteur system because we are brought up like little Americans. Jans Rautenbach tried the auteur
approach but it didn’t work. The audiences did not relate to his films.
The average Afrikaans film is based on false myths. For example, in the
typical love story, the mother is always grey, old and good. The crook
is always bad, like Falconetti. You can merge the two opposites, but
some directors don’t even know what the opposites are.

It
appears then that the average Afrikaans film is confusing social myths
rather than investigating them. Why is there no interaction between
English and Afrikaans elements in the average South African film?

During
the 1960’s Jamie Uys successfully mixed Afrikaans and English elements
into the same story. And then came the subsidy system that put a stop to
the making of films that were truly South African. A unique identity
could have developed by merging the sophistication of the English
speaker and the naïve guts of the Afrikaner. The embryo of this approach
is evident in Katrina, Wild Season, 50:50 and Hans en die Rooinek. The subsidy killed this sort of movie.

Generally
speaking, you seem to adhere closely to the internal rules of specific
genres. Do you ever try to stretch these boundaries?

I
do work in different genres, but I don’t extend the boundaries. I first
want to be sure of the rules of the genre. I want to make the basic
grammar work because I don’t think that it has worked in local film yet.

So you regard this stage in your career as a training period?

Yes,
for everybody in this country. You can’t break laws before you know
them. And we don’t know the laws yet. Even if we do know the laws we’ve
still got specific problems: financial, technical etc. Once these are
solved so that you can tell a story and make it work, then you can try
to make it work at other levels.

My Country My Hat, Keyan Tomaselli interviews David Bensusan

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1983
Published: In The SAFTTA Journal, 1983, Vol. 3 No. 1 2 , pp. 6-15
Copyright: The authors.
David Bensusan is a young South African
film-maker who, in his first, independently financed
feature, has confronted the itinerant position of the
black man in the white man's city, using the form of a thriller.
Subtitled To lose you Pass is to Lose your Life. Bensusan's film
follows the fortunes of a young passless African in his
attempt to find (illegal) employment in Johannesburg.
Although born in Soweto and never having been near a
'homeland', he is destined to be one of the thousands of
illegal citizens - passless because of his mothers
passlessness - she was not allowed to live in
Johannesburg, therefore he has no existence. Finding a job with
Piet (Reghardt van der Berg), a refuse driver, James (Peter
Se-Puma) soon finds himself involved in the internecine strife
within Piet's family unit. Piet's wife, Sarah, (Aletta
Bezuidenhout) who at first treats James with kindness
(although little respect) soon turns an about face when
James' 'blackness' threatens her shaky suburban stability
and he begins to achieve ogre status in her eyes. A
burglary in Piet's house, the disappearance of his Clint
Eastwood hat, his murder of a black bicycle rider he sees
wearing it and the resultant paranoia surrounding James'
possible involvement provides an exciting thread around
which the realities of South Africa's race laws are
weaved. David Bensusan has made an auspicious debut that bodes
well for the future.

CHARLIE UMLAUT- CAPE TOWN FILM FESTIVAL 1983

I supposeMy Country My Hat is what mightbe called an independant film. Could you tell us how youfinanced it?

Taking
loans from family and friends entirely, nothing else. W e
shot it over a period of six weeks shooting six days a
week.

Were your crew professional technicians?

I
was in the industry for a few years, I'm in touch with
people - my cameraman, Mike Buckley, had been an assistant
cameraman for some time, it was a break for him. Sound
man, Rob Harris, is one of the top sound people in the
country; and then there were basically other members of the crew
who mostly came from the profession, and a few people on the
outside, like runners etc. It was a very small crew, and I
think that was one of the main advantages.

And
your actors, you've used some very sophisticated and well
known actors. Did theycharge a similar rate as they would
have charged for a commercial kind of production?

My
black actors I paid the full rate - and people who were
only on the set for a couple of days. My main actors, who
were fairly committed to the making of it, were prepared
to go on a lower fee than what they would normally charge.

So
there is a situation that people are prepared to come in
below their going rate if they feel that the film is worth
it in the long term.

Ja,
there are a number of loopholes, I mean, one of them is
side-stepping agents. A number of them said to me that
they were prepared to negotiate directly for this kind of
film. Which we did, which actually ruled out a lot of
problems, and also kept the finances down. In particular,
someone like Reghardt van der Berg - there are a lot of other
factors why he worked on the film - one of them was that he was
very interested in identifying with a new kind of film making,
getting out of this classical Afrikaans platteland image
which had been built up.

Did you have a problem with distribution, and what were the responses from the major distributors?

Are you talking about South Africa or overseas?

South Africa first.

Well,
South Africa, I took it as a foregone conclusion that the
major's wouldn't touch it, but I took it to them
nevertheless to be able to assess their reaction.
Ster-Kinekor looked at it. They didn't see the whole film. Maybe
you can’t blame them for it. Their simple and blunt reply was
"not economical". Full-stop. They weren't prepared to
say anything more than that. I challenged them on the basis of an
English theatre - something like It’s a Boy or
Dirkie Uys' plays, bringing in exceptionally big
audiences, and they said that they had no policy
whatsoever to cater for that kind of thing. Their
immediate reaction was "well, if this film gets shown at
the drive-ins, the people will kill that us", and my reply
to them was that you haven't got to be so naive to think
that it's made simple for an audience outside of the cities. It
was also shown to UIP-Warner and I didn't get any direct feedback,
but I was told that they turned it down. Vista- rama's
general opinion was that if the film isn't on 35mm, I'm
wasting my time, and left it at that. I have set up black
distribution for the film - maybe by luck, maybe not. I
mean, originally my intention was to distribute it amongst
a white audience. I approached the Department of Trade
and Industries with Tony van der Merwe (Bayeta Films).
They declined it, and they said that it was not a film for
a white audience. There were a number of reasons for that, one of
them was that the film had been turned down by by Ster-Kinekor,
and that they felt that I wouldn't be able to attain a
subsidy anyway. So they actually granted 'black' subsidy
for it, which will bring in something like 20 cents a
ticket sold.

So
you think that that was perhaps working to your advantage
rather than going for the R100 000 qualification?

There
was a peculiar precedent set a few years back by Johan
van Rooyen, who made a film, Bullet on the Run. He
actually obtained on paper an agreement by Ster-Kinekor
that they would distribute, and he got it registered under
the White Subsidy Act. Apparently he then brought in
subsidy for black audiences. Now the Department of Trade and
Industries were very concerned that they didn't want black
audiences to qualify predominantly for white subsidy and vice
versa, and on the basis of that mistake they made, they turned
my film down. But, I'm grateful in the sense in which I'm
guaranteed a fair measure of what subsidy's available on
the black circuit.

Could you tell us why you approached Tonie van der Merwe specifically to help out with

distribution?

Well,
I didn't. He in fact approached me. When the film was
shown at the Durban Film Festival he came to me afterwards
and said 'look, are you interested in distributing it?'.
And up to that point in time I hadn't conceived of the
film going down commercially well for a black audience. I
wasn't actually aware of some of the implications of what's
involved in the black subsidy, so it was a matter of him
approaching me - but my final agreement is split between him and
Ronnie Isaacs who is doing the distribution in and van der Merwe
who is doing it elsewhere.

It's
quite interesting that you should end up with Tonie van
der Merwe, whose own films I’ve categorised as
back-to-the- hometands movies; and Harriet Gavshon in a
recent article has described them as crudely racist. Perhaps
this explains some of the contradictions of the South African
distribution that somebody who is nothing more than a very crude
and bad film maker, who makes very crude racist movies,
actually offer to distribute your film. Do you have any
comments?

There
are many contradictions, we can talk about those, but I
think that one of the interesting things is that Tonie is
basically a businessperson. He isn't an aesthetic
filmmaker, or something of that nature. And I think he's
fairly concerned with what the content of his film is, so I don't
think that's an issue, I think if one looks at them critically
one could obviously unpack certain ideological things
which enter into them unconsciously. But one of the
interesting things is that Tonie's brother, Wally, who is
distributing the film in Johannesburg, is that he declined
to distribute it on the mines, because he thinks it's
going to cause a lot of resentment and a lot of unrest. In
fact, Wally, is of the opinion that the film is for a
white audience, and so the contradictions are rife, wherever
one is.

I've
met a couple of technicians who've remarked that your
film has been scheduled on second channel television in
block of flats. The interesting point here is that the
film will be seen by the kind of people who would normally
not go and see your film in a cinema. Yet they will see
it simply because, if it comes up say, on Sunday night, and there
is nothing else to watch, that's what they're going to watch.
The question becomes: to what extent do you think this
contradiction - or do you see it as a contradiction in
distribution - can be utilised by people like yourself to
make movies viable, as opposed to a situation where they
would not be viable on the commercial circuits?

I'm
very pessimistic about distributing films and covering
costs entirely outside of the major distributors. You can
get a small amount back, but that isn't really anything
substantial. Other elements, like propagating messages,
pushing one's ideology, open up holes - it's a valuable -
area to be explored, and what I've done with my film is,
wherever I've shown it, I've invited people to make use of it
for various occasions. It showed at Sun City, in rather strange
circumstances, to a family planning and therapy group of
Social Welfare people organised by Wits University people
here. There was controversy about the location, but I
wasn’t really concerned about where the location was, as
long as people saw it. The PFP have picked it up and
they're showing it, basically for the purpose of raising
funds, and I'll be getting a small cut of that. It's going
to be shown on many campuses in departments, and those
are the kind of avenues that I'm pushing for at this particular
stage. I'm not going to be recovering much from it, but it's
basically only going to be opening up avenues, and other
things.

Have you had any problems with the censors?

Originally
there were problems. My difficulty was getting it shown
at the Johannesburg Film Festival, and it was turned down
by Len Davis. One of the reasons was that he had too many
South film African films. He was showing the Nadine
Gordimer series at the least twice and some of them three
times and he felt that mine would just be an extra one. I
took it to the Censor Board via the James Polly people (Cape Town
Festival), to get it passed. They passed it, with the
possibility that one of the members of the Directorate was
going to appeal against it. When I approached them just
after the Film Festival they told me it had been given an
'A' clearance.

For Festivals or for general resease?

Well,
at the time - I'm not sure if you're familiar with the
new move that collapsed the distinction. Just before the
commencement of the Cape Town Film Festival, news came
from James Polly that that distinction had been collapsed
as a result of interference by certain major distributors,
who are, and I would almost quote James as saying, are
declaring a sort of policy of war against film festivals in
South Africa. So it was passed for general release.

Tell us a bit about your overseas distribution.

It's
very difficult jumping into overseas distribution, on the
basis of having a limited amount of time available. But
went to people overseas. My major problem, unfortunately
was the Nadine Gordimer series, which have been sold
extensively. They hadn't recouped their costs and it's being
pushed all over Europe. All the companies which have bought the
series have basicallyspent their budget for let's say, Third World, or South African filmmaking. They expressed avery
strong interest in my film and said that it would be
distributed round September when the new budget arrives. I
did them make a sale to the Dutch Television, it
premiered on Dutch Television in January, February this
year. And I've been approached for world distribution and I
haven't basically finalised anything yet.

Would
you suggest that at this stage of your negotiations, that
the overseas potential might well be tapped, so that you
could make at least your money back, if not enough money
to make another film later on?

Look,
I've got no doubts that I'll make my money back, partly
because of the South African black subsidy system which
has come to my rescue in a very contradictory way. But,
part of the difficulty for an American audiences, is what
they would call its parochial nature. They looked at the
film; the people (Tele-culture) who picked up the Nadine Gordimer
series looked at my film. They looked at probably about half of
it, they said to me its very strange, very foreign, and if
they were going to distribute it they would probably have
to dub it into American, and take out the South African
music, and put American music in its place.

Let's
go on discussing the film itself. Why did you choose the
particular actors you had -fairly well-known commercial
type actors, with the possible exception of Reghardt van
der Berg, more in-depth interest in acting, rather than
just money-making.

Reghardt
was obviously a very pertinent choice. Originally, long
before the event, I had Marcel van Heerden to do the part,
and he fell out because he had commitments with South
West Africa and performing arts people. When I actually
approached Reghardt, I was pretty hesitant, because of his
film image as I know it, in connection with platteland
filmmaking. But I was explicitly going for people who could cut
two ways with the general audience - who could gain some sympathy
with an Afrikaans, and another audience, without, as it
were, falling into the traditional kinds of closures and
oppositions which a lot of left South African filmmaking
has lapsed into.

And the other actors you used, were they your first choice?

Peter
Se-Puma was one of my first choices. I was considering
him three months in advance, in November. Then I learnt
that he was going overseas with Poppie Nongena, and I
approached James Mtoba from FUBA who was in New York at
that time, and I got the message that he was wanting to do
it. Three weeks before shooting, he declined the part. He said it
didn't present him with asufficient
challenge; and out of the blue I approached Peter again,
just on the luck. He was working on the Nadine Gordimer
series and had exactly three weeks to spare before going
overseas, and I budgeted the whole film and shot it around
him in those three weeks.

What proportion of your budget went into the salaries of the film?

About twenty percent.

Was it processed by Irene?

Yes, a very big expenditure factor was my shooting ratio, which was twenty to one.

Why was it so high?

For a number of reasons. I wouldn't think it's because of Mike's first job asa
camera-man; but I think it was his keenness to get a very
good polished product. More significantly, because when
one's taken three of four takes, and you don't have it
quite right, it's useless actually settling for that, so
it's always worthwhile pursuing with a few more takes.
Another issue was - a lot of actors were amateurs, and it
was incredibly difficult getting a performance out of
them.

Where did the original idea of this film arise?

Well,
I'm not sure myself. I remember going across the States
in a car, with a friend, for about seven days, we
discussed this notion of an adventure with hat and with a
missing identity etc . It was only when I put it into the
South African context that I felt that I could imbue it
with some kind of social comment by taking the pass system as
being one of its sort of central features.

My
Country My Hat has certain elements in common with Fugard
plays and films, but more particulary with two films made
by American companies in the late 1950’s. Come back
Africa, by Lionel Rogison, and the other is Cry, the
Beloved Country, by Alexander Korda. Have You seen any of
those?

I've
seen Cry, the Beloved Country (was it Sidney Poitier?),
but I wouldn't like to set myself up ideologically with
that kind of tradition.

I
have a press criticism here called "Bensausan Film has no
Stereotypes” from the Cape Times, Wednesday April
27th 1983. It teems to me that this particular reviewer has
totally and utterly, missed the point of what you set out to do
by, I think, trading on stereotypes in a very subtle and
sophisticated rnanner, in a way that perhaps would make
your audience a tittle bit uncomfortable. Could you
comment on that?

One
of the problems when one's dealing with the press is one
obviously has to know what's going to trigger buttons, so
one's real intentions are very seldom actually brought out
through the interview. They might be glimpsed at by an
in-depth and a fairly perceptive criticism or analysis of
the film. But obviously what I was trying to do in the film was to
set up certain characters, and set them up in such a way that
they wouldn't alienate an audience. That was one of my
main aims, but at the same time make a point.

Alienate a white audience?

I think specifically a conservative audience.

To make what point?

To
make a point about the extent to which people are part
and parcel of a social system, and there isn't anything
like standing outside of it which is the classical liberal
view. In the film I take issues with the Houghton wife,
mother, the sunbather, the black-exploiting black, Reghardt van
der Berg the white guy exploiting the guy at the dump. I'm not
trying to set up any kind of simplistic sets of oppositions,
which one does have in traditional left filmmaking.

Your
treatment of the refuse collectors, always singing,
always clowning around in a very stereotypical fashion,
with a Bantu Radio type soundtrack stands out. Why?

Well,
it isn't often one has to actually treated in this film
fall back on authenticity, but they are the real guys. In
fact, there's a custom that only certain of those people
who come

from
the Transkei are allowed to perform that job. There was no actual
explicit directing on their behalf. The extent to which
they were set up in certain scenes, shows that I was keen
to try and put across some kind of conviviality. Now, the
film has been criticised by leftists, especially certain
Marxists, who reckon that I'm repressing the exploitative
conditions under which they're working, and that I
shouldn't represent them 'as being happy or gay, or laughing.’
My reply to that is, first of all, I'm not keen on making
one-dimensional film: I think humour is an essential part of any
situation; and secondly, that the way in which the humour is
actually treated in this film is a way of coping with
their situation, rather than a way of suppressing it.

Wouldn’t
you think that if radical critics are going to take that
position, they should also argue against the fact that you
chose a narrative mode of address, , rather than a
documentary?

Well
that's a more sophisticated line to take. That will be a
Marxist aesthetic kind of line to take. But, I mean, even
if one took that line, if one looks at some of the screen
debates which have been going on for about ten years on
the question of narrative, people like Godard and others,
it's quite clear that people are actually coming back to narrative
in a more sophisticated way, which is politically tenable. I
don't think narrative in itself is something one should
shy away from, it depends on how it's treated.

What
was your intention of making the woman, the housewife, as
neurotic as she was, as opposed to the very stable,
conservative neighbour?

There
are a number of problems with that, in the script and
outside the script. One of the problems outside the script
was Aletta Bezuidenhout, the wife of the garbage truck
driver, who had the same social/class nature as him. We
started off very secure, happy, in their superficial way
in which South African women are, and who then become alerted by a
problem, and gradually degenerate into paranoia. That
regression didn't come across clearly enough. I don't
think in the beginning she was as ljght-hearted as she
could have been. Another problem was the way in which she
acted her part. Shortly after we started shooting we got
the impression that she was trying to to present a
middle-class mother, and we actually changed the script (not the
dialogue) and the image of the mother to accommodate that because
it wasn't going to work out. And we ended up with a
picture of her as representing a mother who is slightly
aloof, comes from a middle-class background, who is
unhappy, who is frustrated, who is tied down to the
domestic situation. And who also represents that kind of
mother, or South African lady, who doesn't quite know how
to cope with the cheeky gardener; you know, the modernist kind of
mother, rather than the traditional boere-type wife who has
a very clear and unambiguous way of treating people who
provoke, or cause problems.

Finally
of course, there is Reghardt van der Berg’s bald head. It
certainly makes him look a fairly aggressive character.
Is there anything else behind that?

When
I approached him he said to me, look should I get a wig,
but I realised immediately that that was the character I
wanted to use. It was interesting, because it played in my
hands in some respects, because you are working with a
character who is very well known. At the same time you're giving
a presentation, say, to an overseas audience, of someone who can
be seen in a radically different light, you know: and that
kind of double-cutting is something which I like.

Now,
the critical response to your film. Just going through
press clippings they’ve obviously responded fairly
sympathetically to what you have tried to do, and yet
that's had no effect on Stet-Kinekor and UIP Warner to release
it. You've shown it at Cape Town, Durban, and at the Picadilly, in
Johannesburg. What were your audiences like, how large,
and what was their Response at the Picadilly?

Gradually
my audiences started improving, by word-of-mouth. A lot
of people came to me and said they were going to tell
their friends to come, and on the last night of a five day
run I had something like a 75% capacity which is very
good.

Why couldn't you keep going for another week then?

I
could, but I hadn't booked the Picadilly, and there are
problems with sermons and other things. It isn't
available. In fact, I would have gone through with another
week, because I I' m sure I would have pulled in an
average of about a 60% audience. But unfortunately, this kind of
film relies very much upon a word of mouth publicity, and also I
think a multiracial audience.

What Response did you have from the Cape Town Festival audience?

I
was present when the film showed at Stellenbosch to a
full house. Generally some good comments, but I think many
of them were slightly oversimplified.

Was it shown in Cape Town itself?

It showed firstly at the Baxter, and then at the Labia.

Did it have good houses?

At
the Baxter they gave me a quarter to six slot from the
opening week, when people were still coming home from
work, but I had about 60% audience at that time.

Did you feel that the organisers at the Cape Town Film Festival were trying to help the film along?

Well
I was a bit disillusioned that they gave me a Thursday
night slot, four days after the opening of the Festival,
at quarter to six rather than, say, at eight o'clock. My
other disillusionment was the fact that they took off, or
they said they took off Fitzcarraldo for the opening
night, and replaced it by by Anna, which had just been
premiered on South African television three weeks prior to
that, and which has had al1 the coverage it needs. So my instinct
was to say to them well, if you don't give me an eight o'clock
slot on Thursday, at least give me one of the nights which
people don't have to go out of their way to come. I think
part of the problem was that the Cape Town organisers
didn't want to, say, back a horse which hadn't shown
itself yet. And it's a classical problem of how a person
actually sets oneself up.

And Durban?

It
showed there once, and I had a full house. And then I
showed it at one of the townships, and I had a fairly
large audience.

You
mentioned that you had previously been part of the
industry itself in South Africa. I know you’ve got a
degree from Central London Potytechnic Film School. I
don’t know how close you are to the industry at the moment
or how close you were in the making of this film. What kind
response did you monitor from professional technicians in the
industry, as opposed to your academic colleagues and people who
helped on the film.

You mean a technical or ideological response?

Well, both.

I
don't think that my technicians were actually really
concerned with the ideological implications of the
message. We discussed very briefly what the film was about,
and most of the time was spent basically setting up shots etc. The
ideological considerations came from here, from Wits.

What
I mean is, there’s an attitude in the industry that if
you don’t make a film that your producer wants then you've
been Professionally irresponsible. So I'm talking about
industry.

Well
I was lucky in the sense that there were no restraints,
there was no investor on my shoulders. I had complete
freedom, which one very seldom gets. In fact, had there
been an investor the film would have been radically
different. So, in that sense I was lucky, but a general
response was people just laughing it off, saying it might be a
modest attempt but it's basically insignificant as far as South
African filmmaking goes, because South African filmmaking
isn't in the hands of the independants, it's in the hands
of the larger companies who are making tons on television.

Do
you get the sense that there’s a growing groundswell full
of people both within the industry and on the fringes of
it who are trying to do something different?

Look,
I'm aware of the fact that there are many technicians who
are actually struggling to get a break, and that break
doesn't come because the quality of the work that they're
doing doesn't command sufficient respect. That's one of
their problems, I mean, the amount of time that people are now
spending making garbage for TV2 and TV3 is incredible, and that's
drawing in the majority of the technicians. So that's the
problem on their behalf, and that's why my technicians saw
my film as being something which offered them something
out of the ordinary.

What plans have you got for the future?

I'm
working on three scripts simultaneously: a low budget, a
medium budget, and a high budget. When I was overseas I
was approached by a number of large, well established
production companies who said they were prepared to do
co-productions with me, and I intend, sooner or later, to go over
and see if I can sort something out on that basis.